Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (47 page)

All that fall the Indians continue to concern Procter. They have been devouring his provisions at an alarming rate. The white leadership is shaky. At seventy, Matthew Elliott can scarcely sit a horse, and McKee is worn down by drink. Tecumseh’s restraining hand is absent. Procter has some hope of reorganizing the tribes around Amherstburg into a raiding party under Colonel William Caldwell, a veteran of Butler’s Rangers during the Revolution. Caldwell possesses enormous influence among the Wyandot, whom he has persuaded to adopt the British cause.

Meanwhile, Procter solves part of his supply problem by dispatching most of the Indians under Elliott to the Rapids of the Maumee, where several hundred acres of corn are waiting to be harvested—the same corn that Harrison has been trying vainly to seize. Elliott may be old and infirm, but he has lost none of his frontier cunning. He has sent Indian spies into Ohio who report that Winchester is again advancing. Elliott dispatches couriers to the villages of the Ottawa and the Potawatomi in Michigan Territory and to the Miami at the ravaged villages of the Mississinewa in Indiana. War parties begin to trickle into Amherstburg; within a month the native force has increased from three hundred to almost eight hundred braves, all stirred to a fever by the depredations of Harrison’s army.

Winchester’s army, meanwhile, is advancing toward the rapids. He arrives on January 11; Procter learns of this two days later. The British commander moves swiftly, calling out the militia, assembling the Indians. It is his intention to scorch the earth (whatever is not already scorched) along the Detroit frontier to deny the Americans provisions and shelter. The following day he dispatches Major Ebenezer Reynolds of the Essex militia with two flank companies and a band of Potawatomi to the little village of Frenchtown
on the River Raisin. Reynolds’s orders are to destroy the village and all its supplies and to remove the French-speaking settlers—forcibly, if necessary—to Canadian soil.

It is not a pleasant task. Who wants his home destroyed, his property removed, and his cattle driven off and killed by Indians? The settlers have worked hard to improve their farms, which lie on both sides of the narrow, low-banked river. Their town, a simple row of some twenty dwelling houses, squatting on the north bank three miles from the mouth, is not designed as a fort. Its only protection is a fence made of split pickets to secure the yards and gardens. The villagers are in a panic; as Reynolds and his men move in, a delegation slips away, heading for the Rapids of the Maumee to plead with Winchester for help. They carry with them a note for Harrison from Isaac Day, a long-time Detroit citizen, who writes that “five hundred true and brave Americans can secure the District of Erie—A timely approach of our armies will secure us from being forced to prison and the whole place from being burned by savage fury.” Day has scarcely sent off this letter when he is seized and jailed. If Winchester is to act at all to save the settlement, he must act at once.

RAPIDS OF THE MAUMEE
, January 17, 1813. Winchester and his senior officers sit in council. Should they go to the relief of Frenchtown? For almost four days word has been coming back of Indian outrages and British high-handedness. Everything is being removed from the village—cattle, carrioles, sleighs, grain, foodstuffs. Citizens such as Isaac Day, suspected of pro-American feelings, have been bundled off to confinement across the river. Winchester’s information is that the British force is ridiculously small: between forty and fifty militia and perhaps a hundred Indians. It is, however, building rapidly. If the Americans move quickly, Day’s note has told them, they can provision themselves at Frenchtown by securing three thousand barrels of flour and much grain. That possibility must seem as tempting as the succour of the villagers.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Allen rises—a graceful, commanding presence, perhaps the most popular man in Winchester’s army, certainly the most distinguished, the most eloquent. A handsome Kentuckian, tall, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, close friend and boyhood companion of the lamented Jo Daviess (Tippecanoe’s victim), next to Clay the state’s greatest orator, leading lawyer, state senator, onetime candidate for governor. When he speaks all listen, for Allen commands as much respect as, if not more than, his general.

He is fed up with inactivity—weary of slow movements that get nowhere, as he complains in one of his letters to his wife, Jane, herself the daughter of a general. He hungers for action; now he sees his chance.

Winchester’s forces, he points out, have three choices: they can withdraw—an ignominy which, piled upon other American setbacks, is unthinkable. They can wait here at the Maumee rapids for the rest of Harrison’s force, but if they do that they will give the British time to build strength. Or they can go to the aid of the beleaguered inhabitants of Frenchtown, secure the desperately needed food at the settlement, strike a decisive blow against the British, open the road to Detroit, and—certainly not least—cover themselves with glory.

The council does not need much convincing, nor does Winchester. Why wait for Harrison, who is sixty-five miles away? A victory over the British—
any
victory—can make Winchester a national hero. His men, he knows, are as eager to move as he is. The term of the six-month volunteers will end in February; they have refused to re-enlist. All want one brief taste of glory before returning home. They have just received a welcome shipment of woollen underwear, and their morale, reduced by long weeks of inactivity and hunger, has risen again. And there is
food
at Frenchtown! Winchester, who has already written to General Perkins at Lower Sandusky asking for reinforcements for a proposed advance, now dispatches a second letter to Harrison announcing his intention to send a detachment to relieve Frenchtown and hold it.

One of Harrison’s many frustrations during this exhausting fall and winter has been a collapse of communications. His letter to
Winchester, urging him to abandon his march to the rapids, arrived too late. Winchester’s reply, announcing his intention to move ahead to the rapids, does not reach him until the force is actually at its destination. It is carried by an eighteen-year-old Kentucky volunteer named Leslie Combs, who, with a single guide, crosses one hundred miles of trackless forest through snow so deep that the two men dare not lie down for fear of suffocation and are forced to sleep standing up. Exhausted, ill, and starving, the pair reach Fort McArthur on January 9. Harrison, at Upper Sandusky, gets Winchester’s letter two days later.

Five days pass during which time Harrison has no idea of Winchester’s position or intentions. Then on the night of the sixteenth he hears from Perkins at Lower Sandusky that Winchester has reached the rapids and wants reinforcements, apparently contemplating an attack.

The news alarms him—if it were in his power he would call Winchester off. He sets off at once for Lower Sandusky, travelling so swiftly that his aide’s horse drops dead of exhaustion. There he immediately dispatches a detachment of artillery, guarded by three hundred infantrymen, to Winchester’s aid. The camp at the rapids is only thirty-six miles away, but the roads are choked with drifting snow, and the party moves slowly.

Two days later, on January 18, he receives confirmation of Winchester’s intention to send a detachment to relieve Frenchtown. Now Harrison is thoroughly alarmed. The proposed move is “opposed to a principle by which I have ever been governed in Indian warfare, i.e. never to make a detachment but under the most urgent circumstances.” He orders two more regiments to march to the rapids and sets off himself, with General Perkins, in a sleigh. Its slowness annoys him. He seizes his servant’s horse, rides on alone. Darkness falls; the horse stumbles into a frozen swamp; the ice gives way; Harrison manages to free himself and pushes on through the night on foot.

Winchester, meanwhile, has already ordered Lieutenant-Colonel William Lewis and 450 troops to attack the enemy at Frenchtown
on the Raisin. Off goes Lewis, with three days’ provisions, followed a few hours later by a second force of one hundred Kentuckians under the eager Lieutenant-Colonel Allen. They rendezvous at Presqu’Isle, a French-Canadian village on the south side of the Maumee, twenty miles from the rapids, eighteen from the Raisin. Elias Darnell is overwhelmed, as are his comrades, by this first contact with anything remotely resembling civilization:

“The sight of this village filled each heart with emotions of cheerfulness and joy; for we had been nearly five months in the wilderness, exposed to every inconvenience, and excluded from everything that had the appearance of a civilized country.”

The inhabitants pour out of their homes, waving white flags, shouting greetings. The troops are in high spirits; they know that some will be corpses on the morrow, but with the eternal optimism of all soldiers, most hew to the conviction that they will survive. Nonetheless, those who can write have sent letters home to wives, parents, or friends. One such is Captain James Price, commander of the Jessamine Blues, who writes rather formally to his wife, Susan, at Nicholasville, Kentucky, that “on the event of battle I have believed it proper to address you these lines.”

It is his two-year-old son that concerns Captain Price rather than his three daughters who, he feels, are his wife’s responsibility: “Teach my boy to love truth,” he writes, “to speak truth at all times.… He must be taught to bear in mind that ‘an honest man is the noblest work of God’; he must be rigidly honest in his dealings.… Never allow him to run about on Sabbath days, fishing. Teach my son the habits of industry.… Industry leads to virtue.… Not a day must be lost in teaching him how to work.… It may be possible I may fall in battle and my only boy must know that his father, next to God, loves his country, and is now risking his life in defending that country against a barbarous and cruel enemy.… Pray for me that you may be with me once more.”

The following morning, January 18, as the Kentucky soldiers march along the frozen lake toward their objective, they meet refugees from Frenchtown. What kind of artillery do the British have,
the troops want to know. “Two pieces about large enough to kill a mouse,” is the reply. From Frenchtown comes word that the British are waiting. Lewis forms up his troops on the ice, and as they come in sight of the settlement, the lone British howitzer opens up. “Fire away with your mouse cannon!” some of the men cry, and as the long drum roll sounds the charge, they cross the slippery Raisin, clamber up the bank, leap the village pickets, and drive the British back toward the forest.

Later, one of the French residents tells Elias Darnell that he has watched an old Wyandot—one of those who took part in the rout of Tupper’s Ohio militia at the rapids—smoking his pipe as the Americans come into sight. “I suppose Ohio men come,” he says. “We give them another chase.” Then as the American line stampedes through the village he cries, “Kentuck, by God!” and joins in the general retreat.

The battle rages from 3
P.M
. to dark. John Allen forces the British left wing back into the forest. The British make a stand behind a chain of enclosed lots and small clusters of houses, where piles of brush and deadfalls bar the way. The American centre under Major George Madison (a future governor of Kentucky) and the left under Major Benjamin Graves now go into action, and the British and Indians fall back, contesting every foot. When dusk falls they have been driven two miles from the village, and the Americans are in firm possession.

Lewis’s triumphant account of the victory is sent immediately by express rider to Winchester, who receives it at dawn. The camp at the rapids is ecstatic. Harking back to Henry Clay’s speech of August 16, Lewis reports that “both officers and soldiers supported the double character of Americans and Kentuckyans.” The state’s honour has been vindicated. The soldiers at both French town and the rapids now feel they are unbeatable, that they will roll right on to Detroit, cross the river, capture Amherstburg. General Simon Perkins, after the fact, will write dryly: “I fancy they were too much impressed with the opinion that Kentucky bravery could not fall before [such] a foe as Indians and Canadians.”

The troops on the Raisin are dangerously exposed. Yet their eagerness for battle is such that Winchester would be hard put to withdraw them even if he wished to—even Harrison will admit that. But Winchester does not wish to. Caught up in the general intoxication of victory, seeing himself and his army as the saviours of his country’s honour, he takes what troops he can spare—fewer than three hundred—and marches off to Frenchtown.

There is another force drawing him and his men toward the little village—an attraction quite as powerful as the prospect of fame and glory: Frenchtown, at this moment, is close to paradise. Here on the vine-clad banks of
la Rivière au Raisin
is luxury: fresh apples, cider by the barrel, sugar, butter, whiskey, and more—houses with roofs, warm beds, hearth sides with crackling fires, the soft presence of women. When Winchester arrives late on the twentieth, Lewis’s men have already sampled these delights. Billeted in no particular order in the homes of the enthusiastic settlers, they are already drunk and quarrelsome, wandering about town late into the night. There is some vague talk of entrenching the position, but it is only talk. The men are weary from fighting, unruly from drink, and in no mood to take orders.